ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an overview of San Pedro’s public health regime, which developed in the 1870s and 1880s, just as San Pedro grew from a small aldea on the shores of the Higuamo River into one of the Dominican Republic’s busiest ports. It discusses that the city council’s power was tested as San Pedro underwent tremendous demographic and economic changes during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The chapter analyzes San Pedro’s first prostitution crisis, which erupted in the 1890s. It argues that the crisis was the product of native-born elites who, anxious and uncomfortable with the influx of female and Afro-Antillean labour, initiated an effort to police public spaces and poor women. Elites’ obsession with prostitution was aided by the city’s effective and institutionalized public health regime. The chapter describes the military government’s public health and sanitation policy, and analyzes the second prostitution crisis that erupted with the passage of the Sanitation Law in 1919.
